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This chapter presents innovative approaches to active learning that were introduced into the teaching of preservice teachers at the Faculty of Education of University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. Over the last three years, the Technology-Enhanced Learning course has seen substantial innovations in both the content and use of teaching strategies designed to prepare the students for their professional lives. The whole update of the course was implemented using the results of action research – all individual changes were rigorously tracked and analyzed. The state of the art in the active learning domain in education of preservice teachers is presented in this chapter.

There is a description of the procedure to update the course, based on the reflections of teachers and feedback from students, gathered during action research. Detailed evaluations of particular methods of active learning that have been proven in teaching are provided.

Besides practical activities with tablets and smartphones, during which students familiarize themselves with various types of applications and reflect on their use in teaching, the course was extended by the use of practical aids for the efficient inclusion of mobile technologies for teaching – the Czech version of Allan Carrington’s Padagogy Wheel. This aid is derived from the revised Bloom’s taxonomy and SAMR model and helps the systematic reflection of preservice teachers when preparing for technology-enhanced teaching.

A significant part of the teaching consists of cooperative projects between preservice teachers and pupils of elementary schools – for example, the preservice teachers help elementary school pupils discover possibilities of virtual reality during Google Cardboard activities, or preservice teachers in teams with elementary school pupils create digital stories together on the topic of Internet safety.

The innovative approach to active teaching in the Technology-Enhanced Learning course is apparent even during the exam. In the course of the exam, students process, present, and defend a lesson plan for the implementation of an activity using digital technologies.

Throughout the learning, as well as at the end, preservice teachers are encouraged to reflect on the teaching in the Technology-Enhanced Learning subject.

The following chapter describes and discusses survey-based findings of students’ perception concerning the acquisition of a third language supported by modern technologies at the university level and provides an overview of research on teaching methodologies. The surveys show that selected reality-based activities not only support students’ language-learning efforts, but also contribute to a more relaxed acquisition of the German language, an important factor of Stephen Krashen’s theory of the lowering of the “Affective Filter,” which stems from 1984. The goal was to find specific technology-enhanced exercises that support the acquisition of the German language, including relatively complex grammatical structures. Although the surveys were conducted among students who took German classes at various levels, the assumption can be made that some aspects of the findings and suggestions are also beneficial for the teaching of other foreign languages.

With the increasing mobility of higher education students across the world, institutions and instructors are confronted with the need to mitigate the linguistic challenges that multilingual students face in learning advanced content in universities or colleges where English or another language is the medium of instruction. This usually pertains to students who have low competence in the language of instruction, as it is a second or third foreign language for them, hence encountering difficulties in the mastery of discipline-specific content and knowledge. First and foremost, this chapter explores the specific linguistic barriers that multilingual students encounter in this context, which relate to several elements of communicative competence in the language of instruction, while investigating empirical studies on instructional strategies for multilingual classes. Secondly, it discusses the use of Merrill’s (2013) first principles of instruction as the main framework in the design of technology-enhanced lesson plans and in the selection implementation of technology-nested instructional strategies, which can assist instructors in creating linguistically inclusive learning environments across disciplines, while maintaining high academic standards. The chapter critically addresses the use of ICT tools in supporting instructional strategies and lesson plan design to mitigate students’ linguistic difficulties with the receptive and productive language skills within discipline-specific contexts. Finally, it provides a lesson plan template and examples encouraging instructors to carefully plan and design instruction and to experiment and monitor the outcomes in their classes.

In this chapter, two reforms in initial teacher education at the University of Oslo are contrasted and compared with regard to the use of digital technology and the underlying ideas of teaching and learning. Reflecting different time periods of technology development, these reforms initiated in 2000 and 2012, respectively, offer valuable insights into how initial teacher education is influenced by technologies in the society and how conceptions of teacher professional learning are changing over time. This study highlights the constraints and affordances of the technologies for changing and bridging practices in teacher education. For the uptake and use of digital technology, the findings point to the necessity of critically examining the way in which the approaches to teaching and learning in initial teacher education and the constraints of how the technology designs are influencing student teachers’ learning.

The digitisation of various parts of society is developing at an increasingly rapid rate, which effects the way people receive services and how familiar they are with new innovations and technological challenges in educational environments. The future members of society must be prepared to participate in the creation of new innovative solutions as well as to support the process of knowledge creation. Despite the fact that rapid development of technologies requires society to immediately respond, even under these circumstances society must be able to make meaningful decisions. These processes put on the forefront of competence have the ability to predict the unpredictable, which means that the educational environment must to a certain extent be able to predict what has not yet existed and cannot be verified. However, it must at the same time involve specialists from different fields who must deal with technologies and technological solutions that have not been tested or proven consistent in the long run, measure their impact and predict what services are up to date and what technologies and skills are required. This section examines the conditions for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in a higher education (HE) context to understand what technologies and digital solutions have traditionally been used as well as the role of educators in driving TEL. The aim of the research is to conduct a pilot study to identify the most recent trends in the use of technologies in HE, identify the future research directions, predict the future directions of development and collect and analyse the obtained data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on higher education (HE) across the globe, including in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi HE system is going through an abrupt transition and transformation to cope with the crisis. This chapter is based on data collected from teachers and students of Bangladeshi public and private HE institutions regarding teaching and learning during the COVID-19 lockdown. In Bangladesh, some universities switched to online distance teaching and learning quickly during this period, and others lagged behind in this regard. Teachers and students from both groups of public and private universities participated in the study, including those who attended online teaching and learning activities and those who did not participate. This chapter highlights both teachers’ and students’ perspectives regarding students’ future preparedness for participating fully in the changing landscape of HE, especially technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Understanding these perspectives of teachers and students is important to address the digital divide and social justice issues in the policy and practice. Within the HE sector in Bangladesh, it is especially vital while transforming its education system and adapting emerging technologies to address the challenges of education in future emergencies.

This chapter aims at contributing to the promotion of education for competent and responsible citizenship with regard to the European Dimension. It takes into consideration five points: (1) the expected profile of the active European citizen in a reliable European cooperation project; (2) the attitude of people in Europe to the European Union (EU) and to the other member countries, according to Eurobarometer and other surveys, keeping in mind the international scenario, and the internal cooperation among the EU states; (3) the situation of citizenship education, as reported by European and international studies as Eurydice (2017); (4) suitable innovative and technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning excellence, aiming at Education of Responsible Competent European Citizenship, including digital citizenship, focusing on knowledge, skills, attitudes, values of responsible citizenship in a democratic society, and developing thinking processes: information management, judgment and decision-making processes, working constantly under European point of view, strengthening contacts, and exchanges among EU member countries; and (5) non-formal and informal learning, influences from the family, the social environment and the mass media on the attitude of people in Europe to the European cooperation. Proposals are developed for improvement in the field of teaching/learning, teacher training, and communication, fostering interaction, engagement, and competent citizenship for the common future.

As the international context in which the EU operates evolves, the liberal conceptions of socio-economic and political cooperation are contested. Generational change in the EU member states drives a substantial change in citizens’ and politicians’ perceptions of the EU’s role in the world. It is not only the manner and the quality of political discourse that change as we speak. The fundamental values, principles and historically consolidated alliances and loyalties are questioned by new generations of voters and politicians who lost the feeling of duty, attachment and loyalty toward previous generations that are gone. This chapter reviews the key points raised in this volume to highlight that apart from teaching EU-related content, and for this matter, any content, today it is necessary to teach the students to think independently first.

This chapter provides an interpretive account of how a large student cohort deals with a major inquiry-based learning (IBL) assessment task in a first-year Marketing Principles subject in undergraduate business studies. It offers a practical example of IBL in action in a discipline that has hitherto received little attention in the IBL literature, namely business, specifically marketing. The chapter positions IBL within the various contemporary pedagogies. The context of Hutchings and O’Rourke’s (2006) study of IBL in action is extended for first-year cohorts, technology-enhanced teaching and the marketing discipline. Further, Hutchings and O’Rourke’s four-part method for describing IBL in action is followed: (1) the enabling factors for the students’ work are described; (2) the process for which they decided on the task is discussed; (3) the method of work is considered, namely ongoing collaboration in a wiki and (4) the outcomes produced are discussed. The chapter reflects on the effects of the IBL task on student learning from both students’ and instructors’ points of view. Material from the students’ work and feedback after completion of the IBL task is used to illustrate the process and inform the interpretive account. The main lessons to be learnt for educators are summarised.